Amish outcast has mixed feelings on former life

Friday

Jan 31, 2014 at 12:01 AMJan 31, 2014 at 1:09 PM

Jan Edwards has many fond memories from the more than a decade that her family spent living among the Amish in Guernsey County. But even though it's been about 25 years, she also still remembers feeling lost when the community turned its back on her for skipping church.

JoAnne Viviano, The Columbus Dispatch

Jan Edwards has many fond memories from the more than a decade that her family spent living among the Amish in Guernsey County.

She talks of weaving hats with friends and entering neighbors' houses without knocking. The pictures she has painted in her Groveport home show things such as a baby being diapered, children playing with kittens and an after-dinner checkers game.

What the paintings don't show is the pain Edwards and her family endured when they were shunned - she calls it an excommunication - by the people with whom she had become so close that they knew her shoe size. It's been about 25 years, but she still remembers feeling lost when the community turned its back on her for skipping church.

"I can still remember how odd it felt when we realized that we couldn't actually be Amish anymore," she said this week, standing in her kitchen, where an Amish painting hangs above a wood-burning stove. "If you aren't that, what are you? So much of your life is involved in this; then it's just gone."

Edwards' story is among those told in The Amish: Shunned, part of the American Experience series, to air on PBS stations on Tuesday. It's the second time that filmmaker Callie Wiser has told the story of the Amish for American Experience. In the first film, she explored their history and who they are today. In this film, she tells the story of several people who have left the church - many of them young and alone - and the challenges they face in the modern world.

"What we wanted to present is that it's not black and white," Wiser said. "Yes, you either are in the church, or you're not in the church, but it's not like there's this moment when your parents stop loving you or people in the community forget you.

"The Amish are humans, too, and the idea that they can just shut off their emotions, that they don't struggle with shunning their child, is crazy."

As part of their Christian faith, the Amish live simply, dress plainly and avoid many of the conveniences of the modern world. They might use shunning as temporary punishment for breaking rules such as using a cellphone or having dress pleats of the wrong width. They also might permanently shun people who leave the church and don't return.

The shunned are made to feel like a "nasty outcast," Edwards said, and others cannot accept anything from them, whether it be money, food, conversation or a handshake. Those who are shunned for punishment might eat at a separate table and sleep in a separate room for a time, she said.

Edwards had grown up in the Akron area. She married at 16 and later moved to a rural area in Guernsey County in eastern Ohio. The young family felt isolated and ill-equipped to live on the land, so they turned to the Amish for help. Eventually, the couple and their oldest son joined the church of about 25 typically large families.

Edwards learned to farm, butcher, sew, quilt and cook. Her family was part of barn raisings, quilting circles, visits to the sick and other large gatherings.

When their oldest son, Paul, married a bishop's daughter, things changed. Edwards' family wasn't fluent in Pennsylvania Dutch - the language used in Amish homes - and she tried to hide that from her daughter-in-law out of fear that she would tell others.

"I realized I've given up maybe too much. I've given up the ability to even speak freely in my own home," she says in the documentary. "That was the beginning of the end."

The family skipped church and was shunned, moving to the Columbus area about two years later.

"Initially when we left the Amish, there was some unpleasant, confusing feelings," she said during an interview at her home. "As that fades, you realize what you had learned and saw, and it really impacts you.

"I know it sounds like a harsh life, but there was so much to counterbalance that."

For about two years, the oldest son stayed with the Amish and shunned his family. Jan Edwards remembers a visit to a newborn grandchild as brief and awkward.

Her son eventually left the Amish. He says in the film that he had become a deacon but was uncomfortable giving out punishments for such misdeeds as a girl not having the strings tied on her cap. He now lives simply in Tennessee.

His mother said he, too, has missed "the camaraderie, the 'us' part" of the Amish world.

But, she said, "you realize there are some things you can't swallow anymore. We had given up our freedom and didn't realize it."

Hear more of Jan Edwards' story at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzP3CIrLsM8 from American Experience.

jviviano@dispatch.com

@JoAnneViviano

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.